---
category: "Technologists"
tags:
  - Person
  - Singularitarianism
  - Transhumanism
  - Google
  - ArtificialIntelligence
summary: "Inventor and futurist who popularized the technological singularity, co-founded the Singularity Summit with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Singularity University at NASA Ames, and joined Google in 2012."
relations:
  - type: founded
    with: "[[Singularity Summit]]"
    role: "co-founder with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky"
    start: 2006
    fn: 1
  - type: founded
    with: "[[Singularity University]]"
    start: 2008-09-20
    fn: 3
  - type: employed_by
    with: "[[Google]]"
    role: "director of engineering"
    start: 2012-12
    fn: 2
created: 2026-09-22
updated: 2026-09-22
---

Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist. In *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (1999) and *The Singularity Is Near* (2005) he popularized the [[Singularitarianism|technological singularity]], the idea, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993, of a point at which machine intelligence outruns human understanding, and set out a "law of accelerating returns" with forecasts for 2029 and 2045.[^1] On December 14, 2012, he announced that [[Google]] had hired him as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.[^2]

### The Singularity Summit and Singularity University

In 2006 [[Peter Thiel]], who had begun funding [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]'s Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence the year before, joined Yudkowsky and Kurzweil in founding the [[Singularity Summit]], first held at Stanford; in December 2012 Singularity University acquired the summit and the institute sold it the "Singularity" name, and the institute became the [[Machine Intelligence Research Institute]].[^1] Singularity University was founded on September 20, 2008, at a founders conference hosted by S. Pete Worden, director of the [[NASA]] Ames Research Center, by a group that included Kurzweil, the X Prize chairman [[Peter Diamandis]], and Robert Richards and Michael Simpson of the International Space University; NASA later clarified that its personnel were not founders. It was housed at the NASA Research Park at Ames.[^3]

Thiel later turned on the risk wing of the movement: in 2025 he named Yudkowsky one of the "legionnaires of the Antichrist" in a private lecture series.[^4] [[Émile P. Torres]] and [[Timnit Gebru]] grouped Kurzweil's singularitarianism with transhumanism, extropianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism in their [[TESCREAL]] bundle.[^5]

### Footnotes

[^1]: Kurzweil, Ray. *The Age of Spiritual Machines,* 1999; *The Singularity Is Near,* Viking, 2005; Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel's funding of the Singularity Institute from 2005 and the 2006 summit; Machine Intelligence Research Institute, "Singularity Summit" archive, https://intelligence.org/singularitysummit/ ; "Singularity Summit 2012 Is Coming To San Francisco October 13-14," *Singularity Hub,* August 29, 2012, and the December 2012 acquisition announcement.
[^2]: Taylor, Colleen. "Ray Kurzweil Joins Google In Full-Time Engineering Director Role; Will Focus On Machine Learning, Language Processing." *TechCrunch,* December 14, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech/
[^3]: NASA. "NASA Ames Becomes Home To Newly Launched Singularity University," February 3, 2009, with later clarification. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-ames-becomes-home-to-newly-launched-singularity-university/
[^4]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures.'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/
[^5]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday* 29, no. 4, April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636